Comments by JoeHill

I see you have nothing to say about McCaw's campaign of intimidation and threats, which was and is illegal. She will be prosceduted yet again I expect this year, for her latest collection of labor malfeasance. You may be haughty, but you are nonetheless ignorant and shortsighted.

And clueless about what most rank and file non-$100K public employees do and make. (Most of those in the upper brackets are not union-represented, and the public may well be able to curtail their income.)

Jarvis, you attempt to silence me just as you would public employees, and just as McCaw tried to silence her staff, and even local business owners. Is it ok with you that she had Barry Cappello write threatening letters to anyone who dared to put a "McCaw Obey the Law" poster in their windows?

Economic boycotts are legitimate weapons in a labor dispute. The DC Circuit misread the record and made new and bad law. Wendy and her minions were found to be prevarications on several occasions, and have violated labor law dozens of times. Only the glacial pace of labor Justice has kept her from facing consequences other than (perhaps) paying her lawyers.

Most public employees don't make more than middle class salaries, and they don't have lifetime tenure, as any laid off or fired employee can attest. Their overall packages -- when compared to people with comparable education and skills -- are NOT larger than workers in the private sector. And by the way, with income inequality increasing, and wages stagnating even as productivity increases, the problem is that private sector wages are too low. Sounds like you're both uncritically defending McCaw's outlawed and taking her anti-public employee myth making to heart.

Right to work is, as you admit, a way to weaken unions. Why bother with the pretense that RTW has anything to do with workers' rights? You obviously think unions are bad, and you're wrong. But RTW is both wrong and dishonest.

And Sam, if you think we have "true equality" in the private sector nonunion workplace now, or that it will become more so if union membership continues to decline, then you have missed the little slice of labor relations reality that has been developing in the opposite direction for at least the last 30 years.

Sam, people who think unions are outmoded today aren't paying attention to what McCaw did to her staff, or to the plain disturbing facts of increasing income inequality and loss of upward mobility (leading to destruction of the middle class). Check out today's farmworkers, hotel workers, car wash workers, restaurant and retail workers, and many others, if you're looking for underpaid workers in today's economy. And unions can protect employees from crazed and unfair work rules, like ones that Wendy imposed to discipline her staff only after the fact. The "right to work" is a misnomer of a policy intended by its advocates -- who are funded by employers -- to weaken unions and make it harder to organize and have a voice in the political system. It enables employees to gain the benefits of collective bargaining without paying their fair share of the costs. That's called freeloading, kinda like the person who habitually shows up at pot lucks empty-handed, only worse.

Barry Cappello lied? ("In response to the conflict of interest allegations, Cappello initially denied that he or his firm had ever represented Knell, and that to the extent anyone in his office ever did, they did so without his knowledge or approval. Based on documentation provided by the real-estate department, Anderle found Cappello’s recollection to be at variance with the facts.") Simply not possible!

Foo, it's not clear which is worse, your lying about what the "average county worker" makes, or the fact that you hate workers, whether public or private sector. Why shouldn't public employees make a decent living wage? In fact, productivity in the workplace has increased in the last decades, and worker pay has not kept up with either inflation or productivity. So guess who profits from that? The lazy coupon-cutting "entrepreneur" who sits in place and does nothing. In Acapulco. Or Monte Carlo. While your buddies like Mitt speak churlishly about the "47 percent".

Foo, why is "class warfare" OK when the rich declare and wage it? That's what's been happening, to the detriment of workers and the middle class, for these 30 years of increased wage inequality, stagnant upward mobility and union membership declines in the face of increasing employer hostility and union-busting, and the weakness of labor law to enforce the American right to unionize for a better working and overall life. Why is it OK for corporations to have First Amendment rights and organize themselves in that form, and get tax and other breaks, while individuals are left to fend for themselves? There is no valid reason -- DC Circuit notwithstanding -- that a corporation's constitutional right should trump labor rights of workers. There is no reason why the News-Press' right to publish trash and unethical reporting, if it so chooses,should extend to the right of workers to get basic protection from the excesses of management.

@JohnLocke, please don't confuse "deference" with the absence of review. There is judicial oversight of administrative agency adjudications, but it is not supposed to be "de novo" and contrary to applicable law, and the record as developed by the parties, as it was in this case. It's clear from your postings that you've worked backwards from your agreement with the result, so that the process and adherence to precedent, which is supposed to restrict the "ipse dixit" approach to decisionmaking in judicial and especially labor disputes, is defenestrated. The real trouble is that this is not an academic discussion, but involves the practical justice that was denied eight deserving people who were fired, and many more who would like to see justice done at this particular workplace.

@Oblati, if McCaw had obeyed the law, none of this would have occurred. Yes, she has the right to publish what she wants, and to operate an unethical publication even as she claims otherwise. But that right to a press free from government interference in what may be published had not, until now, been permitted by any court to extend to violating others' rights to organize or to be free from employer punishment for so doing, including publicly showing disagreement with the employer's labor relations policies and practices, and protesting wrongs imposed on other employees.

From the tenor of your posts, that outcome doesn't bother you, and you're pleased that protesters may be bruised by a constitutional provision meant to be a protective shield now transformed into a cudgel to deny and punish employees unfortunate enough not to own a printing press.

There's not much point in arguing further with either of you, because JL is happy with dishonest judicial outcomes as long as they align with his predilections, and Oblati is happy with whatever Wendy wants, regardless of justice.

I don't know whether the NLRB or the Teamsters will appeal,but the point is that in this case, the three judges went beyond a fair interpretation of "law and precedent", and ignored it and the lengthy factual record. And as I noted above, and as you and the court have failed to accept, the law is that administrative agencies are supposed to develop the evidentiary record and make the primary judgments and findings based on their observation of the evidence and witnesses as they are presented at trial, subject to a "substantial evidence" test on appeal. That is supposed to actually relieve the courts of some burden, and make sure that those closest to the case, and with actual expertise in the labor relations field, make the key decisions.

There is no doubt that what McCaw and her supervisors did violated labor law; the DC Circuit felt it didn't even have to address that set of determinations. What the court did was "fix a problem" that it conjured from its own imagination and conscious misinterpretation of what occurred and how labor law works, because it wasn't based on fact or existing law (which I note you don't address). And you seem to concede that this was an "activist" ruling, since the court "fixed a [perceived] problem" INSTEAD of following the law. And it "fixed" it, after imagining it, by extending the constitution to a place it has never been: protecting violations of statutory law that remains applicable to all private sector employers, including newspapers.

And I guess it's not a "problem" for you that Wendy was granted a limited license to damage the labor relations rights of her employees; how is that to be remedied?

@JohnLocke: 1. The publisher's rights under the constitution are to publish and not publish what she wants, which does not absolve her from obeying labor law, or the remedies ordered by the NLRB, which did not include an order requiring her to (not) publish anything in her paper.2. The law of deference to the NLRB and most similar administrative agencies is enshrined in the law, and was acknowledged by the DC Circuit before it trampled on that principle.3. SCOTUS, in 1937, rejected a newspaper publisher's First Amendment argument that it should not be required to reinstate an editor it had fired. The DC Circuit followed that precedent in 1940. In 1992, the DC Circuit, including two of the panelists who signed on to the corrupt opinion two weeks ago stated that boycott activity by employees during an ongoing labor dispute is statutorily protected activity. This decision is without precedent, sort of like Bush v. Gore.4. What I may be fine with in another case --and you can believe it or not, but I recognize the difference between an honest and dishonest path to a conclusion, and this one was grossly dishonest -- has little to do with the profound injustice imposed via this utterly corrupt and anti-analytical extrafactual decision issued in this case.

And by the way, a management attorney and Republican serving on the NLRB voted with the union and the two Democratic appointees in this case. That was because he bothered to review the record and apply the law.The DC Circuit pretty much admitted that it didn't do the former, and as explained above, it didn't do the latter either.